A
gigantic tent city in downtown Tel Aviv was organized
via Facebook and is now home to hundreds
of protesters. They are mainly middle-class urbanites, angry at
the rapidly rising Israeli cost of living and at Tel Aviv’s lack of
affordable housing. These protest campers are
regularly joined by tens of thousands of marchers who stop by
for the day. Sister demonstrations rose up in Jerusalem and
provincial cities like Haifa and Beersheba.
Doctors and
farmers by the thousands have announced that they are striking
or protesting. Israeli-Palestinians (Palestinians inside Israel
proper, rather than in the West Bank, have citizenship) have
joined
in the protests to demand better opportunities for their
community. While it’s not the epoch-ending demonstrations of Tahrir
Square or Tunis, it’s something.

Unlike the demonstrations in Greece or Spain,
the protesters aren’t just teens, 20-somethings and activist
lifers. There are families with children, middle-aged
professionals, seniors from the mainstream political parties. The
only thing uniting them (well, most of them) is their demographic:
Middle-class. Urban. Not particularly religious. Depending on their
taste in music or books, they veer slightly yuppie or slightly
hipster.

The protesters’ demands aren’t Egyptesque calls for revolution
or Paris ’68 style Situationist action. Instead, they’re more…
amorphous;
and the tent protesters and their sympathizers
still have that middle-class ennui. There are calls for more
affordable housing to be built in cities (Israeli rent/mortgage
rates are sky-high and Netanyahu’s government prefers to build new
housing in West Bank settlements instead), for lower food costs and
for both politicians and the tycoons who dominate Israel’s hybrid
socialist/capitalist economy to be held accountable.

Israel has a low unemployment rate (5.7%), higher education is
heavily subsidized and the children of Middle Eastern, North
African and Russian immigrants have frequent opportunities to make
it into the middle class. But having a job and social mobility does
not count for much for Israelis who are dealing with a skyrocketing
cost of living and a perpetual war in their backyard. The real
problem for the Israelis seems to be discontent with the path their
country is taking.

Salaries in Israel are among the lowest of any industrialized
nation, while housing costs in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are equal to
American cities like Atlanta and Seattle. Food costs have risen
drastically over the past few years, leading to a
tragicomically influential protest over the price of cottage
cheese that helped spur the creation of the tent cities. Both
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem lack subway systems or high-speed rapid
transit and roads are packed for cars and buses; the middle class
have to live in urban areas if they want to avoid massive commutes.
If a professional were to move to the countryside (or do what the
Israeli government wants and become a West Bank settler),
decent-paying jobs simply wouldn’t be there.

And compared to the United States, Israel’s consumer culture is
dominated to a far greater degree by easy credit and all it
entails. Due to the low salaries in Israel in comparison to, say,
South Korea or France, credit reigns supreme. Banks and retailers
commonly encourage customers to
pay for all large purchases in set monthly installments. This
even extends to small purchases; a supermarket customer in Israel
can easily pay for a US$50.00 purchase in three installments.
Israeli wallets are stretched even further by monthly payments for
purchases that commonly exceed the average American credit card
payment. That tends to make middle-class people angry.

Israelis are sympathetic to the protesters. 88% of
Israelis support them, including a significant right-wing
contingent—the majority of Likud (Netanyahu’s party) and Shas (a
quasi-theocratic right-wing party with strong roots among Jews of
Yemeni and Moroccan descent) voters support the protesters as
well.

Since the protests are both popular and crossing across the
traditional left-right divide, politicians of all stripes are
attempting to co-opt them. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that
he
would lower housing costs. The opposition Kadima party has
embraced
the protesters, while both far-left wing parties and Israeli
neo-fascists have attempted to spread their gospel among the Tel
Aviv crowds, to varying
levels of success.

For Israelis, who—based on my time working as a reporter
there—seem to have settled into resigned apathy over the
Israel-Palestinian conflict, the protests are serving as a way to
express the repressed anger they’ve felt over both their
geopolitical situation and
Israel’s unsteady transition from socialism to capitalism. As
one Israeli I spoke to, a journalist for the Walla web portal named
Denis Vitchevsky, told me: “[The] people in Israel, who were
consumed by a security-driven mindset for so long (Gilad
Shalit/Hamas/Hezbollah), are actually looking around themselves and
realizing that something bothers them and it has nothing to do with
military issues. […] This is a by-product of the Israeli mentality,
that associates left and right only with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, not with economics. The whole thing is definitely
left-wing, and socialist—nothing to be ashamed about here.”

Meanwhile, the foreign media has been slow to cover the
protests. The fact is that, without a messy occupation with clearly
defined “good guys” and “bad guys” and dead bodies lying around,
stories don’t really become big news. But with the United States
facing its own debt crisis and European Union economies such as
Greece and Italy about to enter crisis mode, we’ve got years of
middle-class protests coming up. It might be a good idea to take
some notes from Tel Aviv just in case Rome or Paris is next.

Neal Ungerleider
reports on international technology for Fast Company and has been
previously published in Slate, Foreign Policy and
Wired. He lives in Jersey City, NJ and can be found on Twitter.